New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman predicts, “The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in US foreign policy in a long, long time.” Friedman will continue predicting a resolution of the Iraq situation in “the next six months” until at least May 2006 (see May 6-11, 2006). [New York Times, 11/30/2003; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says on National Public Radio: “What I absolutely don’t understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of—I know a lot of these guys—reasonably decent people and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it’s over. I don’t get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what’s the rush? Can we let this play out, please?” Friedman will continue predicting a resolution of the Iraq situation in “the next six months” until at least May 2006 (see May 6-11, 2006). [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman tells CBS anchor Bob Schieffer, “What we’re gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.” Friedman will continue predicting a resolution of the Iraq situation in “the next six months” until at least May 2006 (see May 6-11, 2006). [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman writes: “Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won’t be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.” Friedman will continue predicting a resolution of the Iraq situation in “the next six months” until at least May 2006 (see May 6-11, 2006). [New York Times, 11/28/2004]

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says: “I think we’re in the end game now.… I think we’re in a six-month window here where it’s going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt I think the next congressional election—that’s my own feeling—let alone the presidential one.” Friedman will continue predicting a resolution of the Iraq situation in “the next six months” until at least May 2006 (see May 6-11, 2006). [MSNBC, 9/25/2005; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says: “Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won’t, then we are wasting our time.” Friedman will continue predicting a resolution of the Iraq situation in “the next six months” until at least May 2006 (see May 6-11, 2006). [New York Times, 9/28/2005]

Continuing his trend of predicting a resolution in Iraq within six months—a trend that has been ongoing since at least November 2003 (see May 6-11, 2006)—New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says on CBS, “We’ve teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it’s going to come together.” [CBS News, 12/18/2005 ; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

Continuing his trend of predicting a resolution in Iraq within six months—a trend that has been ongoing since at least November 2003 (see May 6-11, 2006)—New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says on PBS: “We’re at the beginning of, I think, the decisive, I would say six months in Iraq, okay, because I feel like this election—you know, I felt from the beginning Iraq was going to be ultimately… what Iraqis make of it.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

Continuing his trend of predicting a resolution in Iraq within six months—a trend that has been ongoing since at least November 2003 (see May 6-11, 2006)—New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman writes: “The only thing I am certain of is that in the wake of this election, Iraq will be what Iraqis make of it—and the next six months will tell us a lot. I remain guardedly hopeful.” [New York Times, 12/21/2005; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

Continuing his trend of predicting a resolution in Iraq within six months—a trend that has been ongoing since at least November 2003 (see May 6-11, 2006)—New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says on the Oprah Winfrey Show: “I think that we’re going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding. In which case, I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out or whether it really is a fool’s errand.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

Continuing his trend of predicting a resolution in Iraq within six months—a trend that has been ongoing since at least November 2003 (see May 6-11, 2006)—New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says on CBS: “I think we’re in the end game there, in the next three to six months… We’ve got for the first time an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi constitution. Either they’re going to produce the kind of inclusive consensual government that we aspire to in the near term, in which case America will stick with it, or they’re not, in which case I think the bottom’s going to fall out.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

Continuing his trend of predicting a resolution in Iraq within six months—a trend that has been ongoing since at least November 2003 (see May 6-11, 2006)—New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says on NBC: “I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

Continuing his trend of predicting a resolution in Iraq within a matter of months—a trend that has been ongoing since at least November 2003 (see May 6-11, 2006)—New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says on CNN: “Can Iraqis get this government together? If they do, I think the American public will continue to want to support the effort there to try to produce a decent, stable Iraq. But if they don’t, then I think the bottom is going to fall out of public support here for the whole Iraq endeavor. So one way or another, I think we’re in the end game in the sense it’s going to be decided in the next weeks or months whether there’s an Iraq there worth investing in. And that is something only Iraqis can tell us.” [CNN, 4/23/2006; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

Continuing his trend of predicting a resolution in Iraq within six months—a trend that has been ongoing since at least November 2003 (see May 6-11, 2006)—New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman says on MSNBC’s Hardball, “Well, I think that we’re going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months—probably sooner—whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we’re going to have to just let this play out.” [MSNBC, 5/12/2006; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/16/2006]

The New York Times’s foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, recently lambasted for predicting a resolution in Iraq “within six months” at least 14 times for nearly three years (see May 6-11, 2006), explains the rationale behind his predictions to CNN’s Howard Kurtz. Friedman says: “[T]he problem with analyzing the story, Howie, is that it doesn’t—everyone, first of all, this is the most polarized story I’ve certainly written about, so everyone wants, basically, to be proven right, OK? So the left—people who hated the war, they want you to declare the war is over, finish, we give up. The right, just the opposite. But I’ve been trying to just simply track the situation on the ground. And the fact is that the outcome there is unclear, and I reflected that in my column. And I will continue to reflect.… The story’s evolving. And what strikes me as I see it evolve, when it drags on, six months after an election we still don’t have a government. Then, as a columnist who’s offering opinions on what I think the right policy is, it seems to me we have to be telling Iraqis we are not going to be here forever, providing a kind of floor under the chaos, while you dicker over the most minute things when American lives are at stake. So I think it’s a constantly evolving thing.” [CNN, 6/11/2006]

The New York Times’s foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, recently lambasted for predicting a resolution in Iraq “within six months” at least 14 times for nearly three years (see May 6-11, 2006), finally gives up his insistence on giving Iraq “six months” to “play out.” He writes: “It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.… [T]hree years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working. That means ‘staying the course’ is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B—how we might disengage with the least damage possible.” Iraq has finally put together its own elected government, one of the central goals of the reconstruction, and, Friedman writes, “the situation has only worsened.” Iraq is now “a lawless mess,” he writes, and to remain in Iraq is to only “throw more good lives after good lives.” A multinational “Bosnia-like peace conference” is one option, he says, but “[f]or such a conference to come about… the US would probably need to declare its intention to leave. Iraqis, other Arabs, Europeans, and Chinese will get serious about helping to salvage Iraq only if they believe we are leaving and it will damage their interests.” Otherwise, he writes, Iraq will almost certainly “erupt into a much wider civil war, drawing in its neighbors.” Whatever the outcome of withdrawal, he writes, “[t]he longer we maintain a unilateral failing strategy in Iraq, the harder it will be to build such a coalition, and the stronger the enemies of freedom will become.” [New York Times, 8/4/2006]

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist who has recently been made a figure of fun for predicting resolution in Iraq “within six months” for the last three years (see May 6-11, 2006), writes that Iraq will be resolved one way or another within “10 months.” Friedman expands on his new prediction, saying Iraq “is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war. There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons—religion, crime, politics—that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable.… Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police, and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war—it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle. Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shi’ite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch. Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq—and ‘self-sustaining’ is the key metric.” Friedman concludes: “This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave—because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.” [New York Times, 11/29/2006] Four months ago, Friedman had written that the only way to resolve Iraq was to stop trying to rebuild the country and just find a way to exit gracefully (see August 4, 2006).

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